Summer was fading when Principal Karen Lott called her staff into the humble library at Hartford’s Thirman L. Milner School. The children, every one of them black or Latino, would be arriving soon for a back-to-school barbecue in a concrete courtyard, a charitable act for an aging school with cratering poverty, where the glimmer of the Sheff v. O’Neill case has been a mirage.

The dazzling magnet schools that dot the city and region had also been prepping for the return of their students, a rainbow of diversity plucked from a lottery engineered for racial integration. The planetarium and butterfly vivarium were set, aquariums cleaned, mindfulness room cozy — attractions in the constellation of Sheff schools designed to charm white and Asian families from the suburbs.

Elsewhere, at Hartford’s segregated neighborhood schools, some housed in half-empty buildings that the city schools chief acknowledged were “crumbling,” principals like Lott contemplated which tone to set to keep hope alive.

Lott, 51, an ex-social worker in her fourth year at Milner, had pondered how to pair her aching disappointment with go-get-’em optimism, how to bring up test-score failures without demoralizing teachers so close to the first day of school. Weeks earlier, the 20th anniversary of the landmark Sheff ruling — Connecticut’s decree that racial isolation in Hartford schools violated children’s constitutional rights — had come and gone, just another day at Milner and other city neighborhood schools left in Sheff’s shadow.

Except now, their segregation has worsened. As magnet schools rose, siphoning lottery-winners desperate for opportunity in one of America’s poorest cities, Hartford neighborhood schools have become more separate, still unequal, despite the state’s $3 billion Sheff network and busing program that top U.S. education officials tout as a model for voluntary desegregation.

The Sheff plaintiffs argued a generation ago that the city schools’ high concentration of poor blacks and Latinos, of children from single-parent homes, of newcomers still learning English, had so overburdened the system that it shortchanged all students — the exact problems that district leaders reel off today when discussing the struggles of Hartford schools omitted from the Sheff remedy.

At trial, Sheff lawyers had used low test scores as evidence and called city educators to testify about outdated textbooks and shabby school conditions that provoked moral outrage and their seminal victory from the state’s high court on July 9, 1996. When Sheff supporters found out they won, they headed down Vine Street for their triumphant press conference in Milner’s dilapidated auditorium, inside three stories of 1920s brick-and-masonry in an enclave of north Hartford where no magnet schools would be built.

Two decades later, a majority of city students remain in segregated schools. District leaders say that debt-ridden Hartford, with dwindling enrollment and thinning resources that are shared with the magnets, will have to shut down some of the worst-off neighborhood schools. Even Sheff advocates feel conflicted over how far they have come.

And at Milner, where hopeful days alternate with gloom, test scores have hit rock bottom.

Lott had been stewing over one data point that boggled the mind. The district’s assessment last spring revealed that just one student in Milner’s entire third grade could read with proficiency. Third-grade literacy is considered a building block for a lifetime of learning, because how can someone explore history, math and science books, or write, if they cannot read?

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

KAREN LOTT, principal of Milner School, shares a light moment with her staff last August before delivering a pointed back-to-school appeal. “How did we not teach our babies?” she says. “For us, good intentions did not pave a road of success for our students.”

KAREN LOTT, principal of Milner School, shares a light moment with her staff last August before delivering a pointed back-to-school appeal. “How did we not teach our babies?” she says. “For us, good intentions did not pave a road of success for our students.”

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

“I’m not trying to be down, I’m just being honest,” Lott told her staff on that late August day in the library. She stood beside a wall of bare, metal bookshelves and spoke for 25 minutes. “How did we not teach our babies? How did we not move the bar? ... For us, good intentions did not pave a road of success for our students.”

Teachers and aides sunk in their seats around her, some staring at the carpet.

“I’m not blaming the kids, because the kids are who they are,” Lott went on. “They can’t change their circumstances, they can’t make themselves have political power and socioeconomic power. They don’t have it, their parents don’t have it, but that’s not an excuse. ... Where they are is not where they’re destined to be. ... No limousine is going to come down Vine Street and go over on Greenfield and then over on Enfield and say, ‘Come on, y’all! Let’s leave! Come on, we’re going to move to Simsbury! We’re going to move to Avon!’

“Their way out is what we give them through a good education.”

Anyone not up for the task, she said, can look for another job. “No more excuses, folks. I don’t want to hear about ‘the copier’s not working.’”

But months later, Lott wondered how Milner can dig itself out when it keeps getting buried under an avalanche of need.

LAUREN SCHNEIDERMAN | lschneiderman@courant.com

MARY HOOKER students Cyan Garcia, and her brother Cavalli, pose in front of the magnet school’s indoor waterfall on the first day of classes last fall. The environmental-sciences school also features a butterfly vivarium an aquatics laboratory, and a planetarium.

MARY HOOKER students Cyan Garcia, and her brother Cavalli, pose in front of the magnet school’s indoor waterfall on the first day of classes last fall. The environmental-sciences school also features a butterfly vivarium an aquatics laboratory, and a planetarium.

(LAUREN SCHNEIDERMAN | lschneiderman@courant.com)

A mile away are prized seats in popular Capital Prep, with nearly a thousand students on the waitlist, and Classical, where students start learning Latin in sixth grade, among the 20 magnets in the 47-school Hartford district. Across town from Milner is Mary Hooker, a city school converted six and a half years ago into a $41 million environmental sciences hub with an aquatics laboratory, a vivarium where schoolchildren raise monarch butterflies, a planetarium with a 28-foot digital projection dome, and a waterfall that flows into a 3,600-gallon indoor pond in the magnet school’s sunlit lobby.

When a group of Milner middle-schoolers learned of the waterfall, they laughed, incredulous that another Hartford school would have such amenities.

At Milner, paper is rationed like it’s a scarce prison commodity. This is where students blame themselves for the annual turmoil of teacher turnover, and chalk up the lack of certified science staff to a deficit they believe is their fault. They assume they have less because they’re “bad” children in the ’hood, they say, just north of the downtown insurance towers.

“You see these overwhelming differences between schools like Milner and surrounding schools, like Capital Prep or Classical Magnet,” said Milner teacher Lauren Bowers, who walked into a barren music classroom with broken instruments when she started working there in 2012. “And it’s unfair, and it can make the work that’s already heavy and very difficult feel almost near-impossible. You sometimes leave the school asking, does anyone care? Does anyone, besides us in the building, care what’s happening to our kids?

“Are we being forgotten? Are we being left behind?”

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

KAREN LOTT, principal at Hartford’s Thirman L. Milner School, consoles first-grader Shamya Cochran in a school hallway in May 2016. The girl was disappointed that she did not have perfect attendance, making her ineligible for the school’s annual perfect attendance celebration.

KAREN LOTT, principal at Hartford’s Thirman L. Milner School, consoles first-grader Shamya Cochran in a school hallway in May 2016. The girl was disappointed that she did not have perfect attendance, making her ineligible for the school’s annual perfect attendance celebration.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

'Amazing Resentment'

Denise Best’s daughter was nearing kindergarten age when they moved from Boston to Hartford in 1980. When Best looked up the closest public school for Neiima — Vine Street School, renamed nearly a decade later in honor of Thirman L. Milner, the city’s first black mayor — plans changed.

“I just couldn’t wrap my mind around putting her in a school where only 11 percent of the children were reading on grade level,” Best said. Neiima was gifted, a reader since she was 2. Best had the means to look elsewhere and eventually enrolled Neiima in Catholic school.

But in the late ’80s, the plight of Hartford schoolchildren again landed on their doorstep. An organizer that Best knew from theater group rang the bell and presented an opportunity: “You’re always complaining,” Best recalled her saying. “You need to join this suit.”

Denise Best, a plaintiff in Sheff vs. O’Neill, on the responsibility Hartford officials have to improve neighborhood schools.

Denise Best, a plaintiff in Sheff vs. O’Neill, on the responsibility Hartford officials have to improve neighborhood schools.

In April 1989, 17 Hartford and suburban children and their parents, including 12-year-old Neiima and former schoolteacher Best, sued Gov. William A. O’Neill and other state officials. The plaintiffs, led by Annie Fisher School fourth-grader Milo Sheff, announced their intentions at a press conference held in a white-steepled church down the street from Milner.

They pointed out that minority enrollment in the stressed Hartford schools had reached 91 percent.

These days, black and Latino students make up about 95 percent of the city’s neighborhood schools. Milner staffers can’t name a single one of their students who is white.

A divided Connecticut Supreme Court, in its 4-3 Sheff decision in 1996, said Hartford’s de facto segregation was harming lives: “Every passing day shortchanges these children in their ability to learn to contribute to their own well-being and to that of this state and nation. ... We are confident that with energy and good will, appropriate remedies can be found and implemented in time to make a difference before another generation of children suffers the consequences of a segregated public school education.”

Best had lived through Boston’s violence-marred desegregation efforts in the 1970s, and said she was against busing city children out of their community. But she was sold on the big picture, a voluntary plan that Best thought would touch all pockets of Hartford. Like her mother, Neiima Edwards’ motivation for the suit wasn’t about sitting alongside white children in class.

“It was: ‘Let’s get what y’all got,’” said Edwards, now 39. “Really, to be honest.”

Neiima Rose Edwards, a plaintiff in Sheff vs. O’Neill, on the expectations the plaintiffs had for how the lawsuit would help city students.

Neiima Rose Edwards, a plaintiff in Sheff vs. O’Neill, on the expectations the plaintiffs had for how the lawsuit would help city students.

The heavily state-funded magnet schools erected after the Sheff ruling were the stuff of educational dreams. In south Hartford, not far from Mary Hooker with the waterfall, an old housing complex eventually became the site of Breakthrough Magnet School, a 2015 national magnet school of the year with a “mindfulness room,” a cocoon-like retreat with dimmed lights and mood music where students as young as preschoolers can meditate. Annie Fisher, Milo’s old school, was renovated into a Montessori program and a STEM magnet school that sent a science experiment aboard the final flight of space shuttle Atlantis.

As Lott brooded over Milner’s third-grade scores — “I can’t believe those were our real results,” she said, “because it would indicate that we’re going backward” — 83 percent of Annie Fisher STEM’s blend of suburban and city lottery-winners were deemed proficient in third-grade reading.

They are among nearly 19,000 students in Greater Hartford, most from the suburbs, enrolled in one of the 42 Sheff magnet schools with an operating and construction price tag of $3 billion. Another 2,300 students, the vast majority from Hartford, are bused out through a less-expensive initiative called Open Choice, in which the state pays suburban districts to open up seats in their town schools.

In 2015, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA considered Sheff the most promising attempt at desegregation in the Northeast. Former U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. praised the initiatives as a “model for the country” when he visited a Hartford magnet school last summer.

But those closer to the action see a grittier truth. “You have a story of amazing progress,” said Paul Holzer, executive director of Achieve Hartford!, a reform advocacy group that educates parents on their school options. “And on the other side of the coin, you have a story of amazing resentment.”

That resentment has seeped into Sheff’s legacy, fueled by the desperation of a new generation of families locked out of the magnet schools, some in their own neighborhoods where traditional city schools are seen as second-class. More than 3,000 Hartford students were wait-listed this school year, losers of a lottery system shrouded in mystery.

“Sheff is about civil rights, it’s not about denying someone a quality education because they lost the lottery,” Holzer said. “But that’s exactly the sentiment that people associate with Sheff once they get the letter telling them that their son or daughter didn’t get in.”

Last spring, Hartford’s superintendent at the time, Beth Schiavino-Narvaez, painted a Dickensian aftermath of the Sheff case when she addressed the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington. She had been invited to join a panel on public school funding and equity, and when she introduced Hartford as “a tale of two school systems,” she said it was Sheff that had inadvertently “created two school districts.”

The state’s investment in magnet schools had, as intended, peeled off students eager to attend these “beautiful” schools with “high-quality learning opportunities,” Narvaez said. But left in Hartford’s traditional schools were the bulk of students who sap the most resources: about 90 percent of the district’s English language learners and 70 percent of its special education students, whose families are underrepresented in the complicated choice process.

When Narvaez first came to Hartford in 2014, her transition team found that chronic absenteeism was almost three times higher, and suspensions twice as high, in non-magnets vs. the district’s magnet schools — signs of deeper instability in schools without the balm of desegregation. In a state with one of the widest achievement gaps in the nation, a chasm existed within Hartford’s 18 square miles.

Even the city’s growing graduation rate, a cause for celebration, shows cracks. For the class of 2015, the highest rate, 97 percent, belonged to University High School of Science and Engineering, a former national magnet high school of the year where half of the students are from the suburbs. At the segregated Law and Government Academy at Hartford Public High School, less than three miles away, a third of students did not graduate on time.

Sheff, Narvaez told the commission, “has extremely concentrated need in the schools that have not been part of this plan.”

Two weeks before Narvaez’s visit to Washington, a Hartford contingent was in Miami to accept a national district of the year award from Magnet Schools of America. It was that same spring when activists rallied in front of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School in north Hartford, a pre-K-to-grade 8 neighborhood school, like Milner, untouched by the billions spent on Sheff.

King is housed in a nearly century-year-old former high school that used to be a monument to public education, its Collegiate Gothic grandeur looming like a castle on a hill. Last year, a district official described the decaying school as “basically hanging on with duct tape and bubble gum.” Used rodent traps are whisked away before morning roll call. In the auditorium, children sit in broken seats with foam hanging out of ripped cushions.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

MILNER SCHOOL kindergartner Kencele Gould opens a classroom drawer while searching for art supplies last school year. Mouse droppings were later spotted in the drawer.

MILNER SCHOOL kindergartner Kencele Gould opens a classroom drawer while searching for art supplies last school year. Mouse droppings were later spotted in the drawer.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

“Now, show me a school — a predominantly white school — in this region where conditions such as these would be tolerated,” said Muhammad Ansari, president of the NAACP’s Greater Hartford branch, calling it “modern-day apartheid.”

Narvaez practically invited civil rights officials to Hartford. “You go into a gorgeous magnet school that has a butterfly vivarium in it and then you go to a crumbling neighborhood school down the street,” she said. “That kind of inequity just hits you in the face.”

'Without An End Game'

Thirman L. Milner remembered the excitement when the Sheff ruling first came down — in Hartford, anyway. Suburbanites fretted over what it would mean for their affluent districts. It turned out that the magnets, nearly half located beyond the city’s borders, would offer extra opportunities for suburban children as city neighborhood schools sunk into deeper segregation.

“Just a waste of time,” said Milner, 83, lingering outside his namesake school one day last spring. “Sure, they built magnet schools. But they neglected some of the neediest kids in the city, in the neediest part of Hartford, in that whole effort.”

Sheff advocates bristle at the negative assessment. They are glass-half-full people with glass-half-empty bouts of frustration. They point to the flow of thousands of Hartford children, including students who used to attend Milner, who won a seat in choice schools through the lottery. Without the Sheff court order, they say, out-of-town legislators would have little incentive to help at least some of the kids who live within miles, or mere blocks, from the gold-domed state Capitol.

“We’re not responsible, the Sheff decision is not responsible for how Hartford over the years has let Milner be what it is,” plaintiffs’ attorney Martha Stone said. “You can’t blame Sheff for that. ... We can’t be expected to fix every single ill in the Hartford school system.”

Stone and other Sheff supporters believe the case is being used as a scapegoat for systemic failures they blame on state and Hartford officials: on the leadership turnstile in the capital city where a dozen school chiefs have cycled in and out over the past 25 years, and on state budget priorities that fund too few magnet seats to meet the demand.

City school board leaders, in turn, talk about Sheff as a stressor — on district enrollment, on finances, on morale. They argue that a case built to help black and Latino students from Hartford has also empowered white privilege, as magnet schools covet families that are not black or Latino to meet integration quotas. Often, it is suburban families who wield the most influence at Sheff magnets.

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, Milo’s mother and the most vocal Sheff plaintiff over the past two decades, dismisses critics as “stirring up agitation” when they should focus on fixing Hartford’s neighborhood schools, “the 20-something schools that are failing,” as she put it. Horton Sheff still believes in the principles of integration: “Give them the opportunity to be with other people who are not like them, to learn from them.”

“Why are we fighting over something we basically agree upon?” she said. “It’s amazing. It’s crazy.”

But even the Sheff suit’s hardiest defenders reveal tones of regret. Civil rights attorney and law professor John Brittain, a bow-tied member of the original Sheff team, said they initially pursued a claim against the state for policies that created housing segregation, but dropped it so they could get to court sooner. The trial began in late 1992, crawling through the legal system since the 1989 filing.

The Supreme Court decision focused on the racial isolation in schools, but didn’t mandate a specific remedy to fix it and set no timetable for action, leading to years of negotiation stalemates and piecemeal deals. The last Sheff agreement in June 2016 was a one-year extension of the status quo, adding seats to existing choice schools but leaving the majority of Hartford students in illegally segregated schools.

“Anyone who says it’s a failure is wrong,” Stone said of the case. “And anyone who says we haven’t realized the dream we set out for, is absolutely right.”

The plaintiffs and state are still working with a mediator, their discussions secret.

Muhammad Ansari, president of the NAACP Greater Hartford branch, on the unintended consequences of the Sheff desegregation ruling.

Muhammad Ansari, president of the NAACP Greater Hartford branch, on the unintended consequences of the Sheff desegregation ruling.

Retired magnet-school magnate Bruce Douglas wonders if, $3 billion later, they went about it wrong. He concedes there was never a long-term plan to address the prolonged segregation in the rest of the city schools.

Before stepping down more than a year ago, Douglas was the longtime leader of the Capitol Region Education Council in Hartford, a magnet empire with at least 8,000 students in 17 Sheff schools that range from an arts elementary academy in Avon, where children dance ballet or tap, to the futuristic, $81.9 million Academy of Aerospace and Engineering in Windsor, a grade 6-to-12 school that could be mistaken for a high-tech research center. Students there are building a two-seater airplane.

During CREC’s ascent, as the state rushed to open magnet schools, Douglas said he often had meetings with state officials that made no mention of the city schools left behind. He now considers the magnets a “short-term” solution for desegregation and has proposed shifting Sheff dollars toward revitalizing Hartford schools and neighborhoods, although the state is facing a projected $1.7 billion budget deficit.

This month, plans for a state-funded, $108 million CREC environmental-sciences high school were canceled, upending school staff and hundreds of students.

“If you have magnet schools without an end game, and you just keep on developing magnet schools, well ... you’re just spending money,” Douglas said in an earlier interview. “And you’ll never give equity to all the Hartford children.”

'Something Special'

There are more than 11,000 city students enrolled in Hartford’s segregated non-magnet schools, left out of the Sheff advantage that manifests itself in ways big and small, from the budget cushion that magnet schools have to hire specialized teachers to the equipment where children play.

Milner kindergarten teacher Merrick Cop knows her children don’t have much time for recess. Not all of them attended preschool, and so some 5-year-olds arrived in late August not recognizing their written name, and unable to distinguish between a letter and a number. The urgency that Lott expounded in her speech to teachers is reflected in the schedule for Cop’s class: blocks of literacy and math instruction, intervention time, some music or art, and the mandatory recess left for the very end of the day.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

STUDENTS at Milner School get 20 minutes for recess each day. “We tried to have it replaced,” Milner Principal Karen Lott says of the playscape in the school’s courtyard, but she adds that the Hartford school district painted the equipment instead of replacing it in 2015.

STUDENTS at Milner School get 20 minutes for recess each day. “We tried to have it replaced,” Milner Principal Karen Lott says of the playscape in the school’s courtyard, but she adds that the Hartford school district painted the equipment instead of replacing it in 2015.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

Sometimes the class runs late and the children get only two minutes outside before the school’s dismissal, their teacher said. Kids have cried. But at the very least, Cop wishes they had swings, to feel that head rush of freedom while propelling themselves to the sky.

Milner has two colorful but barebone playsets that are like islands in an ocean of concrete along Magnolia Street, a one-way, littered road of apartments and boarded-up buildings with broken windows, an area where police officers can be seen chasing after suspects in broad daylight. For a few weeks last fall, children also had plain view of a sidewalk memorial for 26-year-old Nicholas Brown, who was gunned down on a Saturday night in September, just yards from school property. Police said he was shot as many as 17 times.

The Monday after the homicide, police still swarmed the block, Lott said. She kept students inside for recess. “You could just feel the tension in the air. ... It becomes part of what we have to think about,” the principal said days later. “Not just reading and writing and curriculum.”

But Lott, who has scrounged for school improvement grants to replace mismatched classroom furniture and beat-up cafeteria tables, knows the kids also deserve a better playground. She said she asked the district for a new playset but was told it would cost too much.

At Sheff magnet schools, that kind of upgrade is easier to come by when the target population is white. Magnets can lose funding if they fail to meet the 25-percent integration minimum, so they do all they can to make themselves so appealing that “reduced-isolation” families — legal parlance for whites and, after a 2013 Sheff agreement, Asians, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders — would trade the convenience and quality of their suburban schools.

Growing up, Richardson used to live across from the Vine Street school where he would gain his first principalship. When Richardson talks about his experience in magnet schools, after putting in years in neighborhood schools like Milner, he snaps his fingers like a magician — poof, resources appear.

Betances STEM is a magnet school anomaly in that it’s housed in an old building on a small plot of city land in Hartford’s South End. But it still gets modern technology and new classroom furniture and a towering, fenced-in playground with a corkscrew slide, paid for with state “incubation” funds: an infusion of millions of dollars in start-up money that new magnet schools receive to improve their physical space.

“Sometimes we’re pit against each other as schools, as leaders, principals and whatnot, because our school has the opportunity to get nice stuff,” Richardson said. “It’s in the design. What do you want me to do? ... It’s the unintended consequences of Sheff.”

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

MILNER fourth-grader Izora Johnson-Bozeman, left, and classmate Kamari Godlock prepare to go home after school last spring.

MILNER fourth-grader Izora Johnson-Bozeman, left, and classmate Kamari Godlock prepare to go home after school last spring.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

Maintaining the marvels of Sheff education is not cheap. Beyond the capital funds, Hartford gets just over $13,000 in state aid a year for each of the suburban students in the district’s magnet schools, even if that child is from a wealthy town, has two college-educated parents at home, and can read at grade level. It’s a flat, per-pupil rate that is higher than the average state contribution for a Hartford kid in the same school.

Altogether, a Sheff magnet’s funding can rival or sometimes beat a Hartford neighborhood school with instability and overwhelming needs. Magnet leaders say the magnet investment is needed to pay the specialized teachers, care for the aquariums, nurture the school brand and buy the freebies that are doled out to prospective families at school choice fairs — part of the marketing machine to meet integration goals under Sheff.

Last year, concerned that non-magnet students were becoming more marginalized, the Hartford district shifted more of its discretionary money to the segregated neighborhood schools, a redistribution that was meant to help a school like Milner. The school’s current budget averages $14,792 per student, including government monies for poor, low-performing schools, according to the district.

People entrenched in Milner compare the tweaks to placing a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

MILNER SCHOOL kindergartners learn about butterflies with teacher Jennifer Merritt. From left are Taurean Bryant, Allen Bell, Merritt, Luis Rivera, Grizeyda Sanchez-Davalos, and Jaslen Romero-Rivera. Merritt was visiting the classroom of Merrick Cop, who bought the butterfly kit for her students. “I think it’s important to bring opportunities like that to them,” Cop says. “They still obviously deserve those same experiences.”

MILNER SCHOOL kindergartners learn about butterflies with teacher Jennifer Merritt. From left are Taurean Bryant, Allen Bell, Merritt, Luis Rivera, Grizeyda Sanchez-Davalos, and Jaslen Romero-Rivera. Merritt was visiting the classroom of Merrick Cop, who bought the butterfly kit for her students. “I think it’s important to bring opportunities like that to them,” Cop says. “They still obviously deserve those same experiences.”

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

With her own money, Cop bought a beginner’s butterfly growing kit and placed it inside her kindergarten classroom last spring. She wanted the children to see something transformative, from nature, even if it was just a few slinky caterpillars inside a tabletop netting. Her students hovered close to the mesh, eyes wide with wonder, as if they had seen a spaceship rocket to the moon.

Cop didn’t know that three miles south, a two-story vivarium existed within Mary Hooker Environmental Sciences Magnet, with its own resident entomologist who has helped first-graders rear, tag and release monarchs and then track the butterflies’ migration to Mexico.

“That sounds incredible,” she said. The waterfall, too. “It sounds very soothing and tranquil. But no, we don’t have anything like that here.”

Who Chooses?

A month before the Nicholas Brown homicide, another violent death hit close to home, plunging Milner under a pall of mourning to start the new school year.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

JAMAIRE SMITH, who was an eighth-grader at Milner School, was killed in a motor vehicle accident last August, before the start of school. Family, classmates, teachers and community leaders gathered to celebrate his life, and left messages for him on this board.

JAMAIRE SMITH, who was an eighth-grader at Milner School, was killed in a motor vehicle accident last August, before the start of school. Family, classmates, teachers and community leaders gathered to celebrate his life, and left messages for him on this board.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

On Aug. 25, in the midnight hours after Milner’s welcome-back barbecue, student Jamaire Smith, 13, died when he crashed the stolen car he was driving in north Hartford. Jamaire was five days away from starting eighth grade. Catholic Charities arranged for a nonprofit to bring in therapy dogs for Milner’s first day of school; quiet comfort for Jamaire’s siblings and close friends. Milner held a moment of silence in the cafeteria, the staffers who knew Jamaire biting back tears. A memorial board was tacked onto one of the Milner hallways, classmates penning RIP messages alongside printouts of weeping emojis.

“Woked up and seen your death on the news.”

“Loved having fun with you and always laughing with you.”

“It’s hard for me to stay focus but rest easily ... You been there for me ... Please watch over me.”

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

DEVON COX, facing the camera, hugs a friend outside Shiloh Baptist Church in Hartford following a memorial service in September for Jamaire Smith, an eighth-grader at Milner School who died in a car crash a few days before the start of school. Devon graduated from Milner in June and is now a freshman at Enfield High School.

DEVON COX, facing the camera, hugs a friend outside Shiloh Baptist Church in Hartford following a memorial service in September for Jamaire Smith, an eighth-grader at Milner School who died in a car crash a few days before the start of school. Devon graduated from Milner in June and is now a freshman at Enfield High School.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

But as late summer turned to autumn, another student was also on the mind of Milner’s music teacher: a 6th-grader so creative, so funny, who had recently left Milner for Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy, the magnet school that the U.S. education secretary visited in August.

“My sadness over students leaving isn’t necessarily because they’re going somewhere else — it’s because we couldn’t provide for them here,” Bowers said in her classroom. “They would suffer intellectually here. ... The fact that we can’t provide that kind of environment for them, that’s sad.”

It goes beyond test scores, an imperfect measure of achievement, although Milner’s scores are among the worst in Connecticut. On last spring’s Smarter Balanced exam, only a couple of Milner fourth-graders met the achievement standard in English language arts. One did in math. Educators say it is unfair to judge Milner’s results without recognizing the toxic stress on so many students. Lara White, a Milner middle-school language arts teacher until 2015, said she stocked cereal and granola bars in her room to feed students who lived in a near-constant state of hunger.

What really bothers teachers is being unable to tend to all their students’ talents and needs. “I feel like there’s a lot of artists in that school, or musicians, and we don’t know about it because they’re not really given that chance,” said Meagan Palmer, a former Milner teacher who now teaches in the suburbs. White called it “triage teaching,” spending the bulk of her time and energy on the kids on the verge of high school who were reading at a fourth-grade level.

For students who are ahead of the curve, “you want them to have something better so that they’re prepared,” White said. She and other colleagues nudged them along: Sometimes it was a conversation about options during parent-teacher conferences, or a more detailed, step-by-step tutorial on how to apply for the regional school choice lottery.

“You love this kid,” White said. “And you know that ‘better’ entails that they have to leave.”

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

NEVEAH MCPHATTER a second-grader at Milner School, gets some one-on-one attention lasts spring from Kathleen England, the chief academic officer for the Hartford Public Schools system.

NEVEAH MCPHATTER a second-grader at Milner School, gets some one-on-one attention lasts spring from Kathleen England, the chief academic officer for the Hartford Public Schools system.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

The enduring belief that magnet schools take many of the best students, leaving the rest in struggling neighborhood schools, had been grounded in the test results that typically shine on magnets — their enrollment drawn across the socioeconomic strata — and in the anecdotes of city parents who navigated the system and had the life circumstances to get their child to a bus stop at dawn.

Then researchers at Trinity College in Hartford decided to probe that question: “Who chooses in the Hartford region?” Analyzing streams of information that included lottery applications, test scores and neighborhood-level census data, they found a pattern that was “not random, but linked to student socioeconomic characteristics that often showed higher participation by more privileged families,” they wrote in 2014.

Trinity confirmed that Hartford students with the greatest needs, English language learners and those in special education, were less likely to enter the lottery. The opposite was true for students with higher test scores, as well as those who lived in more well-off areas of the city, with higher median household incomes and homeownership. They were more likely to seek a way out of their neighborhood schools.

Among Hartford’s working poor, the decision to skip the annual lottery ritual is sometimes born from necessity. Without a car, there is comfort in being near if a sick child must be picked up. Despite the state’s $596,000 marketing budget for Sheff this year, there are also parents unaware of the full suite of school options — in some cases, because they cannot read the English or Spanish pamphlets themselves and don’t feel comfortable asking.

The school marketplace is a labyrinth for even the most educated customers. Tiffany Glanville, who has worked as a lawyer, and her husband Doug, an ESPN baseball analyst and former major-league ballplayer, embarked on a winding journey that brought them in and out of the magnets before they decided to send their school-aged children to a promising neighborhood school in Hartford’s Asylum Hill.

“It was a whole process of discovering how complicated this is,” said Glanville, now a vice chairwoman on Hartford’s school board.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

MILNER middle-schoolers Marcia Molyn, Clair Blair and Ariel Bryant, from left in foreground, join other students in the school’s courtyard as the school day ends.

MILNER middle-schoolers Marcia Molyn, Clair Blair and Ariel Bryant, from left in foreground, join other students in the school’s courtyard as the school day ends.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

A History Of Decline

At Milner, for a few fleeting seconds, eighth-grader Angel Rivera seemed impressed that a city school would have a butterfly vivarium. Then his reaction shifted to cold realism.

“We focus on here,” said Angel, 14, carrying the swagger of a grown man. Jamaire was one of his closest friends. “This school is not like some other school. At other schools it’s really nice. ... This school is nothing.”

Jessica Santos, Angel’s mother, has her complaints. The playground is one of them. Yet she still holds on to Milner’s potential, a hope that with more help, the school can rise from the bottom. Of course she hears about the magnet schools.

There remains a shrinking but vocal contingent of Hartford parents who profess loyalty to the schools that are a pulse in their neighborhoods, with dental chairs and social services and teachers who take it upon themselves to start a school basketball team. Milner alum Diane Fernandez swats away the topic of low test scores, insisting that the school is meeting her son’s needs. “I’m not going to remove my son because others aren’t happy with the school,” she said last fall. “I’m happy with the school.”

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

EDIONNA MOORE, at center, works on a social studies project at Milner School with Dinisia Gilling, left, and Jessica Rodriguez, upper right. School officials say Edionna, now in eighth grade, withdrew from Milner this month.

EDIONNA MOORE, at center, works on a social studies project at Milner School with Dinisia Gilling, left, and Jessica Rodriguez, upper right. School officials say Edionna, now in eighth grade, withdrew from Milner this month.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

But embedded in the Sheff universe is a perception that Glanville thinks is damaging the district — a belief among many that all of Hartford’s black-and-brown neighborhood schools are inherently inferior to the Sheff options built to attract whites. Every year, the Glanvilles’ children lose classmates.

“‘What happened to this kid? Oh, they left?’ ... Of course: You were doing the lottery every year to leave,” Glanville said. “And by the way, I don’t even blame you. How can I blame you, in the system that we have?”

The district has been losing students at a steady drip. Its enrollment of 22,153 a decade ago has ebbed to about 20,600, which includes the nearly 5,000 suburban students who help populate the district’s magnet schools.

In the city zone that includes Milner, more than a third of Hartford schoolchildren in grades K-to-8 attend Sheff magnet schools or suburban schools through Open Choice. Milner’s enrollment dipped below 300 in the fall, down from 373 in 2012, and 573 in 2001.

Like Angel, some Milner kids know what else is out there. They might have relatives attending magnet schools, or have traveled across town for a basketball game, or seen the magnet-school ads touting a world of opportunity. White, the former Milner teacher, recalled the times they would report their discovery: “Miss, that school has a fish pond.”

White came to Milner in 2012. By then, Milner’s chronically bad scores had so embarrassed Milner, the ex-mayor, that he had asked Hartford to take his name off the building.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

HASANI HENRY, a fourth-grader, at left, and his cousin, Romario Hayden, a fifth-grader, walk to Hartford’s Milner School every day along Magnolia Street.

HASANI HENRY, a fourth-grader, at left, and his cousin, Romario Hayden, a fifth-grader, walk to Hartford’s Milner School every day along Magnolia Street.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

Generations ago, the schoolhouse had been a gem after opening during the Roaring Twenties. Hartford’s muscular industrial base anchored blocks of growing families, city schools were crowded with children, and the Vine Street school’s grand 600-seat auditorium became a community hub. Old newspaper clippings announced Hanukkah celebrations and recitals in English, Yiddish and Hebrew.

“Over time, the factories closed, more affluent families moved elsewhere, unemployment and crime increased, and housing deteriorated,” the city said in its successful 2014 Promise Zone application to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The city described the zone, a swath of north Hartford that includes Milner, as beset with “pervasive poverty” and disproportionately high incidences of health problems and violence. City officials attributed the slide, in part, to the 1960s construction of the I-84 viaduct that divided the North End from downtown, and the ’68 riots that destroyed businesses after King’s assassination. But by that point, a seismic demographic shift had already taken place in Hartford.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

JOSE SIERRA, a comprehensive intervention specialist at Milner School in Hartford, speaks with second-grader Joshiir Knighton in the hallway last fall.

JOSE SIERRA, a comprehensive intervention specialist at Milner School in Hartford, speaks with second-grader Joshiir Knighton in the hallway last fall.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

Before the mid-century white flight — and the exclusionary zoning, government housing projects and real estate practices that steered the white middle-class out and concentrated the poor in the city — Vine Street School’s enrollment was 3 percent nonwhite. That was in 1952.

In 1966, it was 93 percent nonwhite, Hartford’s then-superintendent, Kenneth Meinke, said in a speech that year that warned of the city’s widening segregation and gaps in learning.

The board of education considered closing Vine Street School in the early 1980s, citing declining enrollment and a decaying building. Parents and teachers rallied; the idea receded. Milner says the renaming of the school after him in 1988 was really a ploy to save it, the theory being that it’ll be harder to shut down an institution if its namesake is still alive.

A $9 million renovation and expansion in the late ’90s fixed the school’s leaky ceilings and crumbling walls in the auditorium, added an elevator to comply with federal disability laws, and brought computers to a meager library that had none. But problems that have always flummoxed Milner School — generational poverty, students constantly coming and going, teacher turnover, churns in leadership — persisted, and in 2012, the state picked Milner for a new approach outside of the Sheff desegregation remedy.

Milner’s two-year stint under the management of a local charter school group proved to be a disastrous experiment. It spurred front-page headlines, accusations of nepotism and missing computers, and an FBI investigation that brought no charges. April Goff Brown, youth services director for Catholic Charities, Milner’s longtime community partner, refers to it as “the Jumoke fiasco,” a destabilizing quake for a school in desperate need of stability.

Jumoke Academy replaced all but a handful of teachers for the 2012-13 year. Some of those new hires recalled feeling startled as they stepped into Milner for the first time. White had previously taught at a Sheff magnet school and expected a certain baseline, such as usable textbooks, instructional materials, not seeing roaches in the staff lounge.

In the beginning of the Jumoke partnership, Estefania Rodriguez said the only history textbooks for her middle-school social studies class were “ancient”: 1997 editions that would have made no mention of 9/11, the Iraq war or the election of the nation’s first black president. Samantha O’Brien, then a recent college graduate in the Teach for America program, was a Milner fifth-grade teacher without a curriculum or instructional supplies, so she accepted donations that her mother, a special education teacher in the suburbs, rummaged together.

“Old materials and things that they weren’t using,” O’Brien said. She shared them with her new colleagues. “It was like we were flying a plane while putting together the pieces.”

Stanley F. Battle, director of the University of St. Joseph’s master of social work program, said he felt the sense of disbelief while serving on Milner’s school governance council. Milner teachers still ask how such a vulnerable school could be treated as a guinea pig. “They will tell you that they’re a school in the corner, tucked away, and nobody cares,” Battle said. “When they told me that, I just sat there with my mouth open.”

It was more than teachers feeling overwhelmed. He heard of children standing on desks, shrieking, when mice scurried underfoot. During one of The Courant’s visits to Milner last year, there were mouse droppings in a classroom drawer where children were reaching for their crayons.

“I still feel like, in many ways, I had to make a very selfish decision,” said White, who left Milner in 2015 to teach at a West Hartford high school. “I literally didn’t want to be an accessory to a system that is oppressing students.”

'They Quit'

Physicist, zoologist, overseas teacher, lawyer, actor — these are the kinds of careers that Milner students dream for themselves. Even Angel, the only one who kept his hand down when Ms. Bowers asked who wanted to go to college, because he didn’t want to commit to something that might not happen, said he saw himself in a laboratory, working as some sort of chemist.

Milner’s version of a science lab is a classroom with desks and a few microscopes that rarely got used when Angel was in seventh grade last school year. There was a set of blood-sample slides, good for a lesson or two, but the class was missing basic equipment for other lessons outlined in the science curriculum, said Jasmine Waterman, who had been a Milner classroom assistant until her turn as science teacher for the 2015-16 year.

Science teachers are already in short supply across the state, so when Milner couldn’t attract and keep one, Lott asked Waterman to fill in as a long-term substitute. The students like her. But Waterman is not certified to teach science, and everyone knew the limitations.

In her classroom last year, Waterman said that no one from the district had explained to her how to teach certain science concepts, or even how to request a field trip.

“The kids are trying to learn,” she said more recently. But compared to students at Annie Fisher STEM, sending science experiments to space, “it’s not good that they could potentially be behind, because then they have so much catching up to do,” Waterman said. “Especially in a school where they’re already behind.”

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

DE’AJA HARRIS, 6, has her picture taken by Milner School teacher Sonia Salvant last May. De’aja had been chosen Kindergarten Student of the Month at Milner.

DE’AJA HARRIS, 6, has her picture taken by Milner School teacher Sonia Salvant last May. De’aja had been chosen Kindergarten Student of the Month at Milner.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

The district has included Milner in its “acceleration” plans for Hartford’s lowest-performing elementary schools, offering math interventions and other support, but last year the students also lacked a certified math teacher.

“The thing is, we were told that we were going to get — that Ms. Lott was looking for good teachers,” Milner eighth-grader Chaelin Scott, 14, said last spring. “But they haven’t found any.”

“They did,” a girl spoke up. “It’s just that they quit.”

When teachers leave — Lott had 11 vacancies to fill in summer 2015, including the entire middle-school team — it unmoors the students every time. Angel refers to that first day of school in late August ’15 as the “tragedy,” when they realized that so many teachers had exited their lives. It was the biggest turnover among city schools that year.

“They begin to trust you, they feel safe with you, and then it’s gone,” said Tynisha Tyson, Milner’s school social worker. Tyson was out sick for two days last spring, and children acted surprised when she came back.

Some teachers have left weeks or months into the year. The ones who stick around sense the anxiety rising around springtime. Bowers sees it in the Jackson Pollock-style crayon drawings presented to her as gifts, and the handwritten missives that read like love notes. “Dear Miss Bowers,” one child wrote, “You are the best Musice TEACHER EVER I hope next [year] your still here?”

New teachers who arrive with a calling to work in troubled schools are often unprepared for the emotional toll that swallows so many of them. “It’s a mismatch,” Lott said, when the greenest teachers are hired for classrooms with a bottleneck of needs, straining to manage the everyday outbursts that interrupt instruction.

But attracting more-experienced educators rarely happens at Milner, where potential hires must decide if they want their reputations tied to a school associated with failure. In the 2014-15 year, 86 percent of Milner’s teaching staff had no more than three years’ experience — by far the highest concentration of new teachers in a district where the average was 34 percent. A mile and a half west, at Annie Fisher STEM, only 9 percent of teachers were considered new, according to district data.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

JOSHIIR KNIGHTON, a second-grader at Milner, finds a comfortable reading nook in his classroom last fall.

JOSHIIR KNIGHTON, a second-grader at Milner, finds a comfortable reading nook in his classroom last fall.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

“It’s hard, it’s just hard,” fourth-grade teacher Agneta Hendershot said in the fall. She is 23 and already feels that Milner is the toughest test she will ever face in her life. “I’m like: OK, it has to get better, it has to get better.”

The college graduate from Texas entered the two-year Teach for America program in June, after tutoring at a low-performing high school in Austin just minutes from the city’s top school — two institutions divided by a highway and poverty lines, the opportunities for students seeming worlds apart.

“I felt very moved to do something about it,” Hendershot said. She completed Teach for America’s summer training and got word that she would be teaching in Connecticut, one of the nation’s wealthiest states. Hendershot said she felt uneasy swooping in and taking someone’s job, but Lott assured her she was needed.

In another wave of staff turnover, both of Milner’s third-grade teachers, two fourth-grade teachers and a fifth-grade teacher were not coming back.

Hendershot saw her classroom several days before the first day of the 2016-17 school year. On short notice, her parents flew in from west Texas to help clean it up.

Two months later, Hendershot was struggling to maintain order so she could get through the curriculum. Her fourth-graders have so many reasons to be frustrated. They have test anxiety and sometimes, the children ask for teachers who left. I miss her, they tell Hendershot. Why did she go?

Hendershot is also young, white and new, and students had been testing her.

“It’s really, really hard, and I feel like I’ve stepped into a situation where there was already a lot of trust issues,” she said. When a student slammed down the classroom phone one day and it ricocheted into Hendershot’s face, blood gushing from her nose, she knew the girl didn’t mean to hurt her.

In early October, Hendershot posted a brief dispatch on Twitter, “It’s 9:42 & other 4th grade teacher is sick & no sub so I have 30 students, already 1 fight, & just got thrown up on by a student. #monday”

Coded In Red

Lott has distributed books to staffers with titles like “Teaching With Poverty In Mind” and “Fostering Resilient Learners,” hoping that explanations on how trauma and adverse childhood experiences affect brain development will offer insight when days get messy. She has brought in more behavioral and mental health workers, and children know that perfect attendance and good behavior will win them trips to amusement parks and Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Last spring, as a morale boost, city public works drivers donated their lunch breaks so they could honk their trucks past the school, orchestrating a parade of heavy machinery.

Longtime Milner employees say the school is calmer than it used to be. There are fewer suspensions, and chronic absenteeism, about 35 percent at Milner in 2013, declined to 26 percent last year, though that still means a quarter of students missed at least 18 days of school.

But the struggle for stability gets harder after Oct. 1. That’s when magnet schools stop enrolling students, and neighborhood schools brace themselves for the post-October influx of kids who arrive throughout the academic year, after the budget has been settled and classes are well underway. Those students bring their own behaviors that can throw a classroom into upheaval.

Milner staffers argue that they need more boots on the ground to meet the need.

Hartford leaders say that bringing equity to all students means having fewer, stronger neighborhood schools.

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, mother of the lead plaintiff in Sheff vs. O'Neill, on the need for suburban districts to take in more Hartford students.

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, mother of the lead plaintiff in Sheff vs. O'Neill, on the need for suburban districts to take in more Hartford students.

In mid-October, during a meeting inside the magnet school with the waterfall, city school officials unveiled proposals for school closures as soon as next summer.

The top 10 schools graded with a safe shade of green were all magnets. Consultants explained that enrollment, test scores and facility conditions all factored into their rankings of which schools ought to be shut down. Coded in red were King, Milner, two other North End schools and a longtime institution in the Frog Hollow neighborhood.

Hartford later shelved the proposals amid an outcry, postponing consolidation talks until the district gets a new superintendent, likely this spring. But the damage had been done. After the initial news came out, Hendershot said, she gathered her students in a circle to ask how they were feeling. Angry, some said. Confused. A few cried.

Soon it became clear that the doubts engulfing Milner had stirred a sort of existential crisis. The school is closing anyway, Hendershot heard from kids. Why should I be doing this work? A classmate taunt began to make the rounds: You’re the reason why this school is closing, because you won’t listen.

“I’m a first-year teacher, I haven’t taught before, they deserve someone that’s going to be, just, better,” Hendershot said in the twilight of an exhausting week. She started a tutoring club after school and buys about $20 worth of dollar-store treats a week as classroom incentives. “I want my kids to have the best teacher out there. ... I love these kids so much.”

In Words, Not Actions

There are people who help Milner in ways they know how. They cart over children’s books, or donate umbrellas after reading in the newspaper that kids were coming to school soaking wet whenever it rained. One woman, Jacinta Williams, drove by Milner last summer and thought it looked different from other schools across town. She collected online donations from friends and family in North Carolina, and with the school’s permission, spent hard hours under the sun digging mulch beds and planting mums so students could see something beautiful when they arrived for the first day of school.

But charity has not filled every institutional gap. As a special education teacher, Jennifer Merritt dreams of the possibilities for Jaslen Romero-Rivera if the Milner first-grader were educated in a suburban school through Open Choice, or at a CREC magnet, which would have billed Hartford for the equipment she needs.

“The child would have everything,” Merritt said.

Jaslen, 7, has a disability in which she cannot bend her elbows or legs, and for a year, Milner has asked the district for a specialized, mechanical spoon so Jaslen can learn how to feed herself.

It’s part of the technology legally mandated in Jaslen’s special education plan that her mother and the school have agreed is necessary for her growth, but that Milner employees said have either arrived months late or not at all.

The girl carries a vibrancy when she walks in her leg braces, but during lunch, as an aide spoon-feeds her, there are few smiles. Physically, it’s possible to let Jaslen lower her face to the cafeteria tray. The thought haunts Merritt, who whispers about dignity.

PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com

JASLEN ROMERO-RIVERA, a first-grader at Milner, supports herself as she walks to class in November. Jaslen suffers from arthrogryposis, and is unable to bend her elbows or other joints. She is usually accompanied by an aide or a special-education teacher.

JASLEN ROMERO-RIVERA, a first-grader at Milner, supports herself as she walks to class in November. Jaslen suffers from arthrogryposis, and is unable to bend her elbows or other joints. She is usually accompanied by an aide or a special-education teacher.

(PATRICK RAYCRAFT | praycraft@courant.com)

“In words, everybody says, ‘We care about these kids, we care about these schools,’” Merritt said. “But in actions, I don’t know if I see it. ... It doesn’t seem like there’s a real, genuine care about what’s happening in this school.”